Mine is exaclty the same although I thought it was due to me using a Quad Core processor instead of an i5 or i7. I have the same amount of RAM as you but using a Gainward 560Ti Golden Sample GPU. Im relieved somewhat that your i7 is runnin at 100% all of the time as I thought my CPU was mashed lol.

OP you are using a laptop, these are far from their desktop counterparts in performance and heat dissipation.

For eg, i have seen i7's sold and advertised as doing 2.8GHz but in reality they run at 1.6GHz, the only time they do 2.8GHz is when they use turbo mode and even then it only can handle this turbo mode for limited time periods (when running in fullscreen mode with a game running and the intergrated gfx card also running at full speed) before throttling back due to heat, the excess heat also effects otehr components since it is a small casing (in any laptop) and that excess ehat transfers easily.

If it isn't that then your CPU and or GPU is downlocking due to a power saving setting.

As for the %100 useage in the menu, that is bad coding on the devs part, by rights the frame rate in the menu (only the menu's) should be capped -

Yeah I'm not saying that my laptop is equal to the performance of a desktop. However I still think it's a bad port because of the fact that even in the menu the system runs at max CPU utilization (which is bad coding).

I'm just disappointed because I also got HL2 and L4D2 and both run very nice on my laptop.

Ok maybe that NVS is too weak. However that the game taxes the system at 100% load in the game menu (when there's nothing going on) that really shouldn't be. This made me post this in the first place as I assumed that there may be a problem with the quality of the game code.

Well I said port because it was apparently developed on Windows first/originally then ported to Mac/Linux -- which makes it a port to me.